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xeno wrote:I'm cool with it. At the same time I don't have kids that I'm overly protective of so what does my opinion matter. If they started selling heroin at your local cvs house moms all over the us would literally lose their shit
betiko wrote:xeno wrote:I'm cool with it. At the same time I don't have kids that I'm overly protective of so what does my opinion matter. If they started selling heroin at your local cvs house moms all over the us would literally lose their shit
what's the difference, drugs would still be frowned upon by society, and I think your argument doesn't stand as I think kids would be a lot safer. If someone wants to do drugs he will always be able to find a way. Drug wars are a lost cause and this seems like the only solution.
Also, take morocco for example. I know Canabis represents over 10% of it's GNP and it's an underground economy. Wouldn't it be better if the government could manage those profits and reinvest in education, infrastructures or whatever?
betiko wrote:Ron Paul got nowhere, does it mean he was wrong if some of his ideas were too much for some people to deal with???
Ron Paul wrote:"...I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."[179]
"Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day!"[177][186]
"An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth [to defend yourself against armed robbery], you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible... I frankly don't know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming."[177][187]
āI miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities. They could also not be as promiscuous. Is it any coincidence that the AIDS epidemic developed after they came 'out of the closet,' and started hyper-promiscuous sodomy? I don't believe so, medically or morally.ā[188][189]
ā[Magic] Johnson may be a sports star, but he is dying [of AIDS] because he violated moral laws.ā[178][190]
ā[T]he criminal āJusticeā Department wants to force dentists to treat these Darth Vader types [people with AIDS] under the vicious Americans With Disabilities Act;" and ā[W]e all have the right to discriminate, which is what freedom of association is all about, especially against killers [AIDS patients].ā[178][191]
Other passages referred to former Secretary of Health & Human Services Donna Shalala as a āshort lesbianā and Martin Luther King, Jr. as a pedophile and ālying socialist satyr" ā while offering praise for former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke and other controversial figures.[177][178][188]
xeno wrote:He also wanted to do away with a lot of the useless departments like education and homeland security but I digress this isn't about him
Symmetry wrote:xeno wrote:He also wanted to do away with a lot of the useless departments like education and homeland security but I digress this isn't about him
The dude was a nut.
xeno wrote:Symmetry wrote:xeno wrote:He also wanted to do away with a lot of the useless departments like education and homeland security but I digress this isn't about him
The dude was a nut.
Or a visionary. Sorry if his views weren't cookie cutter but that's what attracted so many people to him.
Symmetry wrote:Legalizing all drugs is a poor idea. Limited decriminalization is smarter and actually implementable.
betiko wrote:Symmetry wrote:Legalizing all drugs is a poor idea. Limited decriminalization is smarter and actually implementable.
mind elaborating this? I gave my arguments and I think they stand.
The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.
"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.
But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.
At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.
"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.
Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics ā which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place ā may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.
The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate.
Symmetry wrote:betiko wrote:Symmetry wrote:Legalizing all drugs is a poor idea. Limited decriminalization is smarter and actually implementable.
mind elaborating this? I gave my arguments and I think they stand.
Certainly- see Portugal-
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
Now perhaps you can provide some evidence for a successful example of complete legislation?
betiko wrote:Symmetry wrote:betiko wrote:Symmetry wrote:Legalizing all drugs is a poor idea. Limited decriminalization is smarter and actually implementable.
mind elaborating this? I gave my arguments and I think they stand.
Certainly- see Portugal-
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
Now perhaps you can provide some evidence for a successful example of complete legislation?
lol, interesting article, have you actually ready it? It shows that drug use has declined in Portugal as well as HIV due to dirty needles. there is your example, the one you just provided me thank you.
also, this is just about the consumers. I'm talking about something bigger. Governments controlling production, quality control, distribution and incomes.
betiko wrote:well there is no example of what I'm suggesting. Would you not agree on the multiple benefits? there is a moral issue there, governments selling drugs. but if you ballance pros and cons I think the society would have a lot to win in this.
The example you show regarding portugal from my point of view shows only one aspect, treating people on drugs like people who need help rather than like criminals can actually work, doesn't mean going further is bad.
Now there will always be crime, and if drugs is less profitable for thugs who knows, maybe robberies might become a bigger problem, who knows..
Symmetry wrote:betiko wrote:well there is no example of what I'm suggesting. Would you not agree on the multiple benefits? there is a moral issue there, governments selling drugs. but if you ballance pros and cons I think the society would have a lot to win in this.
The example you show regarding portugal from my point of view shows only one aspect, treating people on drugs like people who need help rather than like criminals can actually work, doesn't mean going further is bad.
Now there will always be crime, and if drugs is less profitable for thugs who knows, maybe robberies might become a bigger problem, who knows..
So you were bullshitting? back up your argument or accept that you were wrong, dude.
betiko wrote:Hey guys, did you realize that the first worldwide economy is weapons, seconded by drugs, and petrol is only third? quite scary.
the drug economy represents about 500 billion dollars per year. I don't have the figure regarding how much money governments spend worldwide fighting drug traffic, nor how many death does the drug wars represent per year. But isn't all this something we could counter by legalizing all drugs and let governments organize that economy, a bit like tobacco? And money spent in drug wars spent in anti drugs campaigns?
If the governments ran drug business, at least it would ensure a better quality and it wouldn't be cut with even more dangerous products. Corruption would probably decline greatly and drug lords wouldn't be as powerfull. Also, given the colossal debts most of our governments have, I doubt they would mind the extra cash from the second biggest worldwide economy; nor the spending decrease in law enforcement and justice.
betiko wrote:Of course there would still be some drug smuggling, as it occurs with tobacco. Drug use would probably increase, but I'm not even sure of that. In france, a experimental place has just been created by the government in Paris for people doing heroin ect. They provide clean syringes and a place so that people don't do it in the street. Also they have a team of nurses and psychologist to try to help these people out. We'll see how that goes.
I don't know if any of you has watched the great show "the wire"; there is a season were a high ranked police officer creates a "no man's land" where drug traffic and consumption is not enforced and manages to drop crime rates drastically. His superiors are not officially aware of it, and when it's made public by medias he basically has to step out from the police.
There is probably a great deal of lobbies who don't want to see such thing happening. what do you think?
xeno wrote:I'm cool with it. At the same time I don't have kids that I'm overly protective of so what does my opinion matter. If they started selling heroin at your local cvs house moms all over the us would literally lose their shit
BigBallinStalin wrote:You mean "regulate"? Because if governments ran that business, then you wouldn't get those outcomes.
BigBallinStalin wrote:
Legalization allows for contract disputes to be settled in court as oppose to being settled by the barrel of a gun. Nearly all the homicides related to drugs--and all the social costs--are the unintended consequences of prohibition. Anyone in favor of prohibition must also accept these consequences. Ignorance can no longer be a sufficient excuse.
betiko wrote:Symmetry wrote:betiko wrote:well there is no example of what I'm suggesting. Would you not agree on the multiple benefits? there is a moral issue there, governments selling drugs. but if you ballance pros and cons I think the society would have a lot to win in this.
The example you show regarding portugal from my point of view shows only one aspect, treating people on drugs like people who need help rather than like criminals can actually work, doesn't mean going further is bad.
Now there will always be crime, and if drugs is less profitable for thugs who knows, maybe robberies might become a bigger problem, who knows..
So you were bullshitting? back up your argument or accept that you were wrong, dude.
wrong about what?
betiko wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:You mean "regulate"? Because if governments ran that business, then you wouldn't get those outcomes.
yes, "regulate sounds" better! but This would mean 100% of the economy chain from production to "custommer service"BigBallinStalin wrote:
Legalization allows for contract disputes to be settled in court as oppose to being settled by the barrel of a gun. Nearly all the homicides related to drugs--and all the social costs--are the unintended consequences of prohibition. Anyone in favor of prohibition must also accept these consequences. Ignorance can no longer be a sufficient excuse.
This is one of the many reasons why I think legalization has a lot of pro arguments.
Anyway, like anything in politics there is never any good decision, it's always about chosing the best of 2 evils. Right now I think the system is stupid, it's a lost cause.
It's like prostitution, it should be legalized. It's just human nature, drugs and whores will always exist, and I'd rather see governments earning profits from those rather than spending money to prevent the inevitable from happening. Also, from a health point of view if the governments regulated and controlled these economies they would be a lot safer.
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